There are 75 million Kenny G albums out there. This figure may not frighten you, but it has epidemiologists worried sick. According to public health officials we’re in the midst of a full-blown Kenny G pandemic, and the scary thing is he’s gone airborne.
You can contract Kenny G at your dentist’s office, a karaoke bar, or the frozen foods aisle at your local supermarket. In certain counties in Kansas people have taken to wearing earphones. You may think they’re being overly cautious, but you won’t be laughing when you find yourself grooving to the smooth jazz sounds of 1986’s Duotones.
Duotones marked the beginning of Kenny G. Patient Zero is believed to have been a high school jazz band saxophonist with a compromised musical immune system who happened upon Duotones’s opening track, “Songbird.” Said high-schooler then played the song for other band members, who in turn played it for classmates and parents. And by then it was too late. Kenny G spread faster than Enya.
Few expected the Kenneth Bruce Gorelick who began his career as a sideman with Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra would one day become a worldwide scourge, infecting millions of innocents whose only desire was to ease their daily stress or set the mood for love. It’s true what they say–easy listening destroys lives.
I’m tempted to say all of Kenny’s LPs sound the same, but such is not the case. He’s released a couple of Latin American-themed albums (2016’s Brazilian Nights and 2008’s Rhythm & Romance), an Indian-themed LP (2012’s Namaste), an album of duets (At Last… The Duets Album), and enough Holiday Season LPs to put you off egg nog forever. Seemingly trivial mutations can radically increase the likelihood of infection, and Kenny G knows it. Like any good virus, replication is his raison d’etre.
Easy listening jazz has always posed a threat to the general public, but previous outbreaks have been contained. Chuck Mangione Fever was limited primarily to 1977, when Feels So Good swept the nation, causing widespread nausea and a rare mental condition called Flugelhorn Madness. Grover Washington Jr. Fever was harder to contain, infecting millions between 1975 and 1981. But Kenny G continues to burn through the world population like a California wildfire, and scientists haven’t come close to finding a cure. Like the common flu, Kenny G is likely to be with us forever.
If containing the spread of Kenny G has caused many virologists and public health officials to throw up their hands, there are a few common sense measures you can take if you don’t want to be part of the problem. The first and most important is to keep your Kenny G albums out of the hands of your children. They’re our future and their welfare is your responsibility. The second is to avoid places where Kenny G is likely to be played. If this means losing friends or refusing to visit grandma, so be it. She’s no longer your grandma anyway–she’s one of those pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
One of the greatest threats we face as humans is that perverse hipsters will “re-evaluate” the music of Kenny G and elevate it to cool status. Should this happen, Brooklyn and Portland will become plague zones, and the U.S. government will be forced to build huge containment domes over them to prevent the spread of the virus to East Orange and Beaverton. Ironic gestures of this type could leave us with two Chernobyls on our hands.
Some argue that seeing as how you can run from Kenny but can’t hide, we may as well get it over with now and gather together as communities to listen to him en masse. I hope it doesn’t come to this. When all is darkness, we must cling to hope. There could be another Jonas Salk out there as I write this, peering into a microscope in search of a cure. If so, he’d better hurry. A storm cometh our way, and it’s very, very smooth.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
F
